The Gothamist is a daily weblog covering New York city’s personalities, news stories, and media with humorous photos and running commentary. I really enjoy reading their stories because their short, concise and to the point.

The following was taken from TuftsNow, a Tuft’s University newsletter, specifically from an interview conducted by Marjorie Howard of Thomas Nolan, a former Boston police officer. What’s included is the final question and answer:

Why do you think we have such a violent culture?

I think it’s the ready availability and proliferation of high-powered firearms and certainly the way we socialize young men to resolve conflicts. Boys are taught to be competitive and to win and to use aggression to achieve those goals. Girls are taught to resolve conflicts through negotiation. We no longer see conflicts resolved with a fist fight or an argument or even a knife—they get resolved with a bullet. If the young man in Newtown didn’t have access to so many guns and wasn’t so familiar with them, what he did couldn’t have been so easily accomplished. We want to think that this guy has to be crazy and disordered, and obviously there was a problem, but we may find he was never diagnosed with any kind of mental disorder. Certainly in other areas of the world, where guns aren’t as available, it would have been much more difficult to carry out this atrocity.